Member of the OakTable Network and co-author of “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table“. Provided the only Oracle related presentation at Infor’s Inforum 2008 User’s Conference (on the topic of general Oracle database administration and performance tuning). My current job extends well beyond Oracle database administration responsibilities, providing opportunities for database performance tuning, network administration, programming, hardware/software troubleshooting, mentoring fellow IT staff, and end-user training for the Infor Visual Enterprise ERP system as well as other custom developed applications. Formerly a computer/technology instructor and Novell Netware administrator. Started using computers in 1981 when computers with 5KB of memory were popular.

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Update January 20, 2011

Lately, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of views of this page, quite possibly due to the number of Oracle Database related books that I have reviewed. Over the years I have become increasingly focused on reducing confusion, both for myself and also for people who seem to be searching for the right answer. It is a bit painful to see the same bad advice and/or just plain wrong information repeated over and over again. With this blog I have often attempted to point the spotlight at such information, whether it appears in Oracle related books, commercial websites, blogs, Internet discussion forums, or even documentation published as part of the Oracle Database documentation library (that includes Metalink/MOS). Reproducible test cases are an important component of this blog and those test cases are used to not only demonstrate how Oracle Database features work, but also how Oracle Database features do not work.

The usefulness of this blog depends to a great degree on the quality of the comments that are attached to many of the blog articles. Take a look at the quality of the comments – you might also agree that many times those comments, which are typically provided by other readers who are also accomplished DBAs, programmers, consultants, book authors, or people like me who are just trying to make sense of Oracle Database’s behavior, are better than the articles that sparked the comments. Keep up the good work – we might just figure this thing out. 🙂

Currently, there are about 300 articles on this blog. To quickly locate a blog article, take a look at the Blog Article Index. The top five articles for the last ninety days are listed at the right side of every blog article.

Roughly a year ago I wrote an article that included a suggested list of Oracle Database books. You can find that article here Book Library – Finding Motivation. Obviously, that article is a year old, and may not include all of the interesting books that you might find to be useful. The “Troubleshooting Oracle Performance” book is the first book that I read which I felt worthy of spending the time to write a formal review. Since reading that book I have tried to review most of the Oracle Database books that I read. It seems that my reviews have grown significantly longer since reviewing that first book – the most recent review was roughly eight pages in length, while the review prior to that was roughly twenty four pages in length. The most recent book reviews also include a break-out blog article series that allows readers to provide comment for sections of the book (readers are not permitted to add comments directly to my book reviews – if you want to directly comment on my reviews, leave the comment on the Amazon.com website). My level of expectations for Oracle related books is quite high, and if I am paying money to learn from a book, I expect the book to be correct and deliver on the promises made by the publisher (see this article for my list of expectations). The list below includes all of the book reviews I have written to date (the “Misc Oracle Related Books” link includes short summary paragraphs for several other books):

Have fun and enjoy the site; don’t forget to stop, think, and understand. If you want to play the game of “Whose answer is it, anyway?” feel free to take a look at the articles in that blog article category.

Hints for Posting Code Sections in Comments

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When the spacing of text in a comment section is important for readability (execution plans, PL/SQL blocks, SQL, SQL*Plus output, etc.) please use a <pre> tag before the code section and a </pre> tag after the code section:
<pre>

SQL> SELECT
2 SYSDATE TODAY
3 FROM
4 DUAL;
TODAY
---------
01-MAR-12

</pre>
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When posting test case samples, it is much easier for people to reproduce the test case when the SQL*Plus line prefixes are not included - if possible, please remove those line prefixes. This:

SELECT
SYSDATE TODAY
FROM
DUAL;

Is easier to execute in a test case script than this:

SQL> SELECT
2 SYSDATE TODAY
3 FROM
4 DUAL;

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Greater than and Less than signs in code sections are often interpretted as HTML formatting commands. Please replace these characters in the code sections with the HTML equivalents for these characters: